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1. My second year as Teaching Fellow involved two new preps -- Hebrew and Intermediate Greek. At first, I was a little annoyed at Bill Patrick for finageling a second two year term as Teaching Fellow. That meant he would teach the summer Greek intensive, which was money I wanted. But it seems like perhaps I was allowed to teach Hebrew then, which was perfectly delightful for me.
Lawson Stone had sung the praises of LaSor (although apparently not enough to use it). I loved it. It was my first experiment with teaching biblical languages inductively. It wouldn't be the last.
Teaching a biblical language inductively can require some pastoral skills. With LaSor especially, students had a good deal of miscellaneous information rattling around in their heads before they could see the big picture. And that is highly uncomfortable -- especially the more "J" you are.
Then, all of a sudden, everything comes together. And in a shorter time period than it would have taken otherwise.
But I loved it. It was great for me, having first learned Hebrew from Seow's textbook, to solidify my understanding with LaSor. Maybe a smidge selfish. But to this day, my sense of Hebrew phonetics is far better than it would be otherwise.
I had some really good students. I like to boast that I was Brian Russell's Hebrew teacher. Of course, I couldn't answer half his questions. So let's just say he taught himself.
Jeff Finger stands out to me as a student, not so much because of his Hebrew prowess, although I'm sure he got an A. Rather, he was a quite unique fellow. I remember one class where he was laying on top of his desk on his back holding LaSor up in the air. This is a desk chair I'm talking about.
2. He seemed like just the right person to play "Lust Boy" for Ichthus that summer of 1991. Denise Greenhalgh, as I recall, had asked me to be Ichthusman for the Christian rock festival. Bob Lyon had started the festival way back in the 70s, as I recall, as a Christian alternative to Woodstock. (I would later propose to Angie during the festival in 1998. This was before they moved it to the place where it died.)
As a small taste of what I had become, I made the suggestion in all seriousness of parachuting into the festival. After checking, the response was that the insurance company would drop us like a hot potato if we tried such a stunt.
So I invented the costume myself. Yellow cleaning gloves. Someone sowed a yellow fish (ichthus) on a black turtleneck I got at a Goodwill type store. Black pants. Purple cape. Some (cheap) cool 90s sunglasses. I had some used clothes that we cut up and vecroed so that I could rip them off to the tune of "This looks like a job for Ichthusmannnnnn!" The costume was underneath.
So that summer we vanquished Lust Boy. I think Scott Brown might have been "Sin Man" the next summer.
3. I also taught Intermediate Greek using Brooks and Winbery as a grammar and Metzger's Lexical Aids. Students were supposed to go through Galatians and both do sentence diagrams and give a semantic analysis for each word.
No doubt, I was not the best teacher for this. That was I believe when I met Jim McNeely. I seem to recall that Bryan Blankenship was in that class as well, but I could be wrong. As usual, I learned a great deal while teaching.
The year after I was teaching fellow, I would take two semesters at UK in Sanskrit. It was a linguistics sequence. I wish I could say I gave it the time it deserved. I mention it because Sanskrit has an 8 case noun system, and Brooks and Winbery analyzed the five Greek cases using that Indo-European model. [1]
The Nominative, Accusative, and Vocative have always stood alone. But the genitive was originally a genitive and ablative. And the dative was originally dative, locative, and instrumental cases. Indeed, this is a curious thing to me. While we are used to thinking of things getting more developed over time, the Indo-European languages have actually become much simpler over time. Modern Greek is simpler than ancient Greek, and ancient Greek was simpler than its Indo-European ancestor.
I have always felt like I was just a step behind. If I knew everything that I have studied, I would be quite a knowledgable fellow.
4. McNeely likes to remind me that I was fined for trespassing on railroad property with a girl I was dating from Asbury College at the time. But I'll let that story pass.
[1] I suppose this is a good place to mention that I sat in on Dr. Stone's Akkadian class too my first year as Teaching Fellow. I didn't find the time to learn it as well as I wished. It was quite a fun deviation, since it used cuneiform for its syllables. He needed my warm body for the class to go, as I recall.
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